This Year in DAOs
A 2022 retrospective of the most exciting aspects of the DAO space.
2022 was a year of evolution in the DAO space. No longer just a ‘chat room with a wallet’, the strongest DAOs today are shaping the DAO ecosystem of tomorrow.
Web3 Highlight of the Year
♦ All herald the long-awaited Ethereum (ETH) Merge! In addition to being a flawlessly-executed technical achievement, the Merge represents a critical step forward for web3. By eliminating energy-intensive mining, and securing the network using staked Ethereum, thus begins the era of more sustainable, secure, scalable, and planet-friendly ETH.
DAOs IRL
🌏 More than a community of individuals connected through the blockchain, enthusiasts across the globe are eagerly convening in real life, simultaneously building intimate human connections and signaling insatiable interest in web3, the blockchain, and DAOs.
🏰 DAO Palace brought together 30 DAO builders, economists, researchers, founders, world leaders, and politicians to explore and incubate all things DAO during a research-focused two-week residency at Germany’s Bückeburg Castle. Get an insider’s view here.
🖼 Glitch united artists for a two-week residency at an 18th-century French château. Nearly 40 participants imagined, debated, and developed projects and standards to support a new ecosystem of open creativity and digital abundance in the metaverse.
🇨🇴 Devcon Bogotá hosted 6,000 in-person attendees and 60,000 viewers of the Devcon live streams, confirming a growing interest in Ethereum, web3, DAOs, and more.
🌶 MCON Denver offered an assembly of conversations, learnings, and experimental growth about DAOs, and the gm bus took the web3 narrative on the road.
🌍 ETHGlobal events broke records across the globe. In December, ETHIndia brought together 2,000 participants from 321 cities for the largest Ethereum Hackathon yet.
🏕 DWeb Camp assembled pioneers from web1 to web3 to discuss strategies for open information, governance experimentation, and eat s’mores in the redwood forest. The Redwood Parliament details the event’s workshops, games, and gatherings, and provides insight into the Governance Layer for the internet.
#DAOsforthepeople
🐙 Realistically, most DAO interactions will take place online. And that’s okay. Logos and MetaGame are two DAOs making entering the DAO space more approachable and more fun. In 2022 we celebrated the launch of MetaGame 1.0 and a shift towards more user-friendly DAOs.
Safety First
🔐 Nothing generates clicks like headlines broadcasting wrongdoing and loss, but those stories are only a fraction of what’s happening on the blockchain. In 2022, the web3 ecosystem saw several positive developments around exploits and hacks.
🦸🏼♂️ Safe Guardians, a group of leaders from the DAO and web3 ecosystem, were chosen to guide the development of Safe, a core building block of how DAO treasuries, governance, and operations are managed.
🧠 Logos co-founder Isaac Patka used his successful execution of a hack to educate DAOs on how they can safeguard their treasuries. Isaac also created DAO Roasts to encourage the constant questioning of a DAO’s stated intention and on-chain operational values. Most recently, Isaac’s work in on-chain safety was published in the MIT Computational Law Report.
🕵🏻♂️ Nouns DAO took a proactive role in protecting the ecosystem by supporting investigative journalist and blockchain sleuth ZachXBT with a 100 ETH reward to continue his work in the web3 exploit space.
🔥 Fire, which helps people identify fraudulent transaction requests before they happen, launched.
The Legal Landscape
⚖️ Much of web3 remains undefined from a legal perspective. Is cryptocurrency a security or a commodity? Who is accountable in a DAO?
📃 One story testing these questions is the saga of Ooki DAO, which was initially served with a lawsuit via a help chat box. District Judge William Orrick later ordered the CFTC to serve the DAO’s original-but-now-inactive founders, Tom Bean and Kyle Kistner. This question won’t be answered any time soon.
🪙 Commodity or security? How this debate ends - and how the decision will affect us all - remains to be seen. In the meantime, if you let uncertainty halt your progress, you’ll get nothing done.
🍎 Further proving that web3 is no longer fringe, Harvard Law School published a primer on DAOs. It discusses the recent growth of DAOs, how they work, their current legal standing in the US, advantages and disadvantages, how they could shape our future, and more.
🌪 Transaction service Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the US government. In the attempt to crack down on money laundering and illegal transactions, many users lost the ability to send and receive payments, process payroll, and perform other transactions. From this dumpster fire new alternative private transaction services, like ZKBob, emerged.
👕 by MetaFactory
#web3forgood
🇺🇦 In 2022, we saw the core intent and ethos of web3 in full force. Public good and social impact thrived on the blockchain. Exemplary players include Ukraine DAO, established last February and having raised $7M dollars to date, and Gitcoin DAO, which has applied its quadratic funding model to supporting social good initiatives in a pilot with UNICEF. In the category of DAOs trying to save the world, KlimaDAO’s blockchain-based carbon credit-backed token deserves a mention. Finally, the launch of Public Nouns gained momentum by using NFTs to fund, support, and spread awareness about public goods. To date: 171 ETH raised and two public goods projects funded. Learn more about how web3 can save the world in the Impact DAO Book.
Recommended
To get into the know, or for a refresher on our collective direction, we recommend the following nuggets.
🧑🏫 Beyond Bitcoin - Decentralized Autonomous Organizations - Ron Boger and Ori Shimony of dOrg share an exciting video lecture from Stanford University's BioE60 Beyond Bitcoin course on DAOs - their history, current uses, and potential applications.
📽️ How DAOhaus Became the go-to Platform for Launching a Moloch DAO - Moloch is a simple, open-source DAO framework that increases security, usability, and extensibility. In this AMA video session, Spencer Graham, Product Manager for DAOhaus, explains how the Moloch DAO framework improves DAO coordination and governance.
⭐️ The DAOstar roundtable published a standard on classifying DAOs, with the goal of creating consistency around what DAOs say they are, how they operate, and to promote interoperability among standards for reputation, data, and more.
🎉 Happy Holidays! This Week in DAOs will be back in 2023!
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